News Release
Elisa and Wind River Deploy First Fully Automated Edge Data Center for Commercial Service, Able to Reduce Staff-hours by Up to 90%

HELSINKI & ALAMEDA, Calif – July 31, 2023 – Elisa Oyj, a leading telecommunications company, has achieved a significant milestone in the field of edge computing with the successful deployment of its first fully automated edge data center site, which is the second edge site to go into commercial production this year. This groundbreaking project combines Wind River Studio Cloud Platform as the production-grade distributed Kubernetes solution for managing cloud infrastructure, User Plane Function (UPF) application from Elisa’s current 5G core vendor, and the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, an industry leading platform that delivers a single pane of glass to manage and automate applications deployment in large-scale distributed environments.

The deployment of this state-of-the-art edge data center site represents a significant achievement to strengthen Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations. It showcases the company's commitment to embracing next-generation technologies to unlock the potential of edge computing for a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing.

”We are delighted to continue our efficient collaboration with Wind River and take the first Fully Automated Edge Data Center into commercial service. Constant automation development is our key to future success. Combined with Wind River´s distributed cloud capabilities, we are able to further improve our customer satisfaction by reducing the time to deploy and adding the quality of the process. This strengthens Elisa’s position as the leading digital service provider in automating operations and edge deployments," says Markus Kinnunen, Vice President, Cloud Services, Elisa. 

“As a leader in the 5G landscape that powers the majority of 5G vRAN/O-RAN deployments with global operators, our Wind River Studio capabilities address service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing a physically distributed, ultra-low latency cloud-native infrastructure,” said Avijit Sinha, Chief Product Officer, Wind River. “Elisa is an innovator, and with their recent milestone, they are helping to advance the industry.”

Key to this achievement is the collaboration between the industry leaders. Wind River Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture, based on open source, for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale.  Elisa's 5G core UPF application enhances network performance, ensuring efficient and reliable data transmission and processing at the edge. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of Wind River Studio Conductor, the deployment process becomes fully automated, enabling rapid and efficient provisioning of edge data center resources.

The major outcomes can be grouped in three areas: time to prepare, time to deploy and quality of the process:

• Time to prepare: The biggest savings came from parameter settings followed by environment preparation work. The team was able to execute hundreds of tests and scripts before going into live network in the same amount of time that it would typically take to manually run much fewer tests in the traditional model.
• Time to deploy: The overall Operator time, measured in terms of staff-hours, for commissioning the edge DC site from preparation, parameter settings to complete installation and testing is reduced by 90% as compared to doing the very same tasks manually. Furthermore, the overall deployment time is reduced by around 50% thanks to the automation of the processes.
• Quality of the process: Finally, automation brings in additional benefits where multiple tasks can now be run in parallel with minimal probability of human errors, reducing time to service and enhancing network quality.

The successful implementation of this milestone project paves the way for future advancements in edge computing by Elisa. It sets a precedent for the seamless integration of Studio Cloud Platform, critical applications, and automation technologies, empowering industries to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new possibilities.

The collaborative effort involved in this achievement underscores the commitment of Elisa and its technology partner Wind River to drive innovation and push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of edge computing. Elisa continues to position itself as a leader in cutting-edge technologies, driving economic growth and benefits to the society.